Twitter reports more pressure from governments

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 25/01/2022

Twitter is facing unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly attempt to intervene and remove content, the company’s vice president for public policy and philanthropy, Sinéad McSweeney writes in a blog post. ”As important regulatory discussions take place across the globe, we believe it is crucial for citizens to be aware of the requests made by their governments.”

Of the total global volume of legal demands in the first half of 2021,  95% originated from only five countries (in decreasing order): Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea.

”We withheld or required account holders to remove some or all of the reported content in response to 54% of these global legal demands.

• Twitter required account holders to remove 4.7M Tweets that violated the Twitter Rules.Of the Tweets removed, 68% received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, with an additional 24% receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions. In total, impressions on these violative Tweets accounted for less than 0.1% of all impressions for all Tweets during that time period.
• In these six months, Twitter permanently suspended 453,754 unique accounts for violations of the company´s child sexual exploitation (CSE) policy — 89% of those accounts were proactively identified and removed.
• In Q1 2021, Twitter suspended 44,974 unique accounts for promotion of terrorism and violent Organizations.93% of those accounts were removed.

Twitter says it continues to see an overall downward trend in the number of violating accounts which is likely due to changing behaviours of these actors coupled with continued improvements of the company’s defenses in this area.